


picking petals off the flowers

by tonyang (kurusui)



Category: PRISTIN (Band)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2018-12-25 07:18:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12030924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurusui/pseuds/tonyang
Summary: 1. three times rena is interrupted. (the best realizations are slow and gradual.) / 2. That’s... like a relationship! You start slow and then rise up quickly! / 3. I don't even know if I could hear those words said to me by the one I want to hear them from.sungyeon and rena in moments.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> the prologue to this is something about the way [160528](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt1I-fSwkHk&list=PL2tvQQgWnfaiWmJj5lArQj9sAqO2VKCPd&index=4) \+ rena being sick and also turtle ship + memory of the wind juxtaposition but I honestly had no idea how to write that in any interesting way (trust me i tried) so I’m just going to tell you i am constantly thinking about those things. & i have been wanting to write any sungrena of any quality for like 4 months so now that it is in existence i can live in peace. i have no pride in this except for the fact that it has been written albeit very quickly at a late hour

Over the hiatus Rena finds herself with a lot of spare time and no drama in her life.

She starts going after Sungyeon because it’s amusing. It’s funny to see her wrinkle her nose or push her away when Rena gets close, then fight and laugh with her. And Rena didn’t expect this, but over time, Sungyeon becomes even more responsive and fun.

“You’re not even funny,” Rena scoffs, twirling her ramen around in the disposable tin container. “I just pretend to laugh at your jokes.” They’re out walking, after stopping by the convenience store. Sungyeon is ever practical and finishes it all after a few minutes, but Rena holds onto it until it gets cold.

“Please,” Sungyeon says. “I didn’t know you could act. Go lead a drama with how many times you faked laughing your head off after I said something.”

“Hmph!” Rena says, no defense left. “I’m not pwaying with you anymwore.”

“Get out,” Sungyeon shouts when Rena starts doing pouty aegyo. “OUT!” She points straight at the Han River.

“I’m only four, you can’t do this to meeeee, ow! Hahaha...” Sungyeon gives her a light shove and she falls to the ground, legs on the sidewalk but white shorts on the grass.

“Oops,” Sungyeon says when she realizes.

Rena is laughing it out until Sungyeon points the stains out. “I’m gonna kill you if it doesn’t come out,” Rena threatens. “These are new!”

“They’re going to come out,” Sungyeon assures her with a giggle. “I’ll wash them out by hand before I buy you anything.”

  


“Hey, my Bae,” Rena singsongs when Sungyeon walks into the room they’ll have lunch in. The members are supposed to trickle in when they’re done with individual shoots. “Baesoongie!”

“Embarrassing,” she says, covering half of her face with her hand. “That was so loud,” she hisses when she gets closer and sits next to Rena, who is her own brand of shamelessness. “There are so many staff members in here.”

“Not like it’s a secret~”

Sungyeon grins. “Just like the clothes you stole from Kyungwon unnie and haven’t ret-”

“Okay. Fine! We have a deal. Fair.”

“I mean, you already yelled my nicknames to like 15 people but okay, sure.” Rena looks pleased.

“The whole world knows your nicknames, Sungyeon-ah, we told all the fans already. When you’re an idol everything is pretty much public anyway!”

“You are ridiculous in capital letters, unnie. And Hangul doesn’t have capital letters so you’re R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S in English.”

“I can’t believe you just spelled out beautiful, like you think I’m beautiful,” Rena says in mock surprise, holding out her hands like a zombie trying to reach Sungyeon. “Thank you so mmmm-”

Sungyeon stops her from talking her with a hug. It doesn’t quite physically block her from speaking, but somehow the words die in her mouth.

“That was just to surprise you,” she says. “Don’t think anything of it, not at all!”

It’s a little silly of Sungyeon herself to say that.

  


It’s her thoughts this time that get cut off when Sungyeon approaches the couch she’s lying down on and makes some room on it for her to sit.

“Hey, you’re squishing my legs,” Rena complains as Sungyeon artfully arranges them vertically and leans against them. “Fifty thousand won for 20 minutes.”

“I’ll pay in what you owe me for embarrassing moments,” she says.

Oh. That’s just what she had been thinking about. “I’m - that thing with the naengmyeon store lady was so funny though,” Rena says, and she breaks into some puahahahs that Sungyeon acknowledges with a lively sigh.

“Most people would apologize for things like that, ya know.” Sungyeon ruffles Rena’s hair, and it’s so easily made frizzy in this state that Rena could get mad if she wanted to. But with Sungyeon, she doesn't really care.

“I was going to! I was about to start off with I’m sorry but it was just hysterical,” she says, and the hand motions she uses recalls some of what happened, which was a mix of clumsy movements and awkward phrasing. Needless to say, Sungyeon and Rena both walked out of the shop mortified, though it was really mostly one person’s fault.

“I admit it,” Sungyeon says, and Rena smiles.

“Three more hours in the waiting room, I guess,” Rena states quietly, closing her eyes and folding her hands over her stomach. Sungyeon gets up and Rena opens them right away. “Where are you going?”

“I thought you wanted to nap?”

“I never said that,” Rena says, and she just keeps looking at Sungyeon, so the latter reluctantly sits back down, shaking her head. Rena is like a child sometimes, but awfully lovable. “This is more uncomfortable the second time around.”

“Stay,” Rena insists. When Sungyeon doesn’t leave again, she closes her eyes again in satisfaction. “Let’s talk about something?”

“What?” Sungyeon asks, looking at the dark circles under Rena’s eyes that need makeup retouching. “Want me to tell you a story?”

“YES.”

“You really are such a child,” Sungyeon comments, but she starts recounting the plot of something she wrote as part of creative writing in school. She gets up before she can finish introducing the characters, because Rena’s fallen asleep.

It was what else Rena was thinking about, in between the episodes and the ways they made fun of each other. Hard to pin down when and hard to explain why, but it happened anyway.

Somewhere along the line, Sungyeon became a bed of roses.


	2. daydreaming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That’s... like a relationship! You start slow and then rise up quickly!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> funnily enough this was supposed to be part of "picking petals off the flowers" before i decided i didn't like it and started over... but this is quite good now that i'm rereading it? i hate wasting words, so here you are. (also why did i use yaebin here and rena after ...? don't we all want to know.)

Sungyeon has a habit of daydreaming when she’s doing her homework. What she keeps telling herself is that this is going to be one of her last math assignments ever before she graduates, so she should just buckle down and get it done. But it’s a little harder than that.

It’s kind of nice to have your brain wired that way when you’re a lyricist, though. Right now she’s still working on making songs catchy, lyrics that rhyme and click in just the right ways. Bumzu says she’s improved since before debut, so she’s happy. Still, Sungyeon wants to be able to look at the everyday things in her life and get some kind of meaning out of those and into her songs. Like, um, this set of problems on matching graphs to complicated functions with trig and exponentials. That’s... like a relationship! You start slow and then rise up quickly! Or sometimes, you just go around in circles.

“Minkyung unnie! I found a way to make math not boring!” Sungyeon yells, pleased with both her discovery and her fake productive procrastination.

“That’s nice,” she replies, smiling sweetly from the kitchen table where she’s got a One Piece volume someone gifted her in her hands. Minkyung shifts her specs up her nose. “Tell someone who needs to know.”

Sungyeon rolls her eyes. “Here.” She shoves a notebook with a bunch of sample lines that have no context into Minkyung’s face. Some of them happen to be math metaphors.

Minkyung blinks a few times and skims the list. “Hey, these are pretty. Are you thinking about just dropping them into the songs?”

“No idea.”

“Okay, but this one about functions is  _ not _ gonna cut it. You sound like a nerd.”

“That’s fair,” Sungyeon says with a sheepish sigh. “I didn’t mean, literally putting those lines in-”

“You were gonna try,” Minkyung says knowingly. “You don’t have to pretend.”

They hear the sound of someone hitting the wall and turn to look. Yaebin is leaning against the wall, one leg in the air and arms out for balance. “I tripped.”

Sungyeon grins. “I can see that.”

“I wanted to sneak backhug Minkyung unnie, but it failed, sadly,” Yaebin says, not looking sad at all. She has other ways of getting what she wants.

“Glad it turned out that way,” Minkyung says, turning up her nose. Yaebin pouts and hugs her anyways. In the process, Sungyeon takes a step away from the table, and Yaebin gets an open view of the notebook on the table.

“Relationships are non-linear,” she reads slowly, off of the left page. Sungyeon wrote these notes in English in the margin, but hearing it out loud, especially in Yaebin's accent, makes her grimace.

“Okay, you were right, unnie. Scrapped! Let’s stick to movies for inspiration,” Sungyeon says.

“Non-linear like not a straight line?” Yaebin asks, noting the five rough sketches of graphs. Sungyeon’s never claimed to be an artist. (Drawing music doesn’t count.) “That’s cute. Like push and pull.”

“Ooh, I like where this is going,” Sungyeon says excitedly, and Yaebin holds out her hand for a high five. 

Minkyung goes back to reading the manga. “Form your own writing team.”

“Maybe we will.” Yaebin laughs. “See you in the studio, Sungyeon.”


	3. when you love someone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don't even know if I could hear those words said to me by the one I want to hear them from.”

Yaebin can only see a lump of blankets in the corner, seeping into the crack between the bed and the wall. But she’s not fooled so easily.

“I asked Yewon where you were and she said you didn’t leave, and here you are. There’s no use hiding from me any longer, ya know.” Yaebin crawls onto the bed, hitting the comforter gently to lure out the figure underneath.

Then she hears a sniffle.

“I don’t want you to see my face,” Sungyeon mutters.

“I don’t care.” Her fingers start to move again, searching for the edges of the blanket.

“It’s cold,” Sungyeon wails, and then Yaebin tugs at the hem and she screeches from the cold air breaking her bubble of warmth. “I told you to stop.”

Yaebin stops, perched on what feels like Sungyeon’s knee under layers of cloth, and folds her arms. Her eyes fall to the frizzy strands of Sungyeon’s brown hair peeking out, looking dead, lifeless. Unconditioned. “What’s wrong, Baesoongie.”

“Nothing. I have cramps,” she answers, muffled.

Yaebin doesn’t believe her. “Is it so bad that you’re crying or something, you never act like this. If that was really it you’d be on the couch watching movies with us and you would’ve taken a painkiller. Did you?”

“I haven’t been crying,” Sungyeon snaps. “I don’t cry.”

“I know.”

“Get off me, also,” she adds, tiredly. Yaebin slips off her knee and settles at the edge of the bed, legs close to her chest. Sungyeon rolls over, curling into the wall, right where the heating vent sends air. “Guess Eunwoo unnie is waiting for you to get back to that movie.”

“I’ve seen it already, so you aren’t escaping me.”

Sungyeon sighs, and Yaebin can see the comforter inflate and deflate with her breathing. “Stop, please. I wish you would just stop. It hurts, can you leave me alone?”

There has never been a time where her voice didn’t carry the emotions that she was feeling, never mind the pain. That hurts to hear, too. But Yaebin shifts, legs dangling off the side of the bed, a movement away from touching the ground. “Do you really want that?”

She decides not to wait for an answer, jumps off the bed, hears the spring frame and the rise of the mattress without her added weight.

“I don’t know,” Sungyeon says finally.

“Do you want to talk to me?” Her voice lingers in the middle of the room.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Is this about that person again?”

Sungyeon throws the edge of her blanket down with her two hands, slamming them against the bed. Now that her head and shoulders are exposed, Yaebin can see the red blotches on her face, probably the result of trapping herself in that hot space. She’s not going to look for traces of crying at all, that’s unethical, it feels like, in this situation.

“What are you talking about.” She makes eye contact. Yaebin bites her lip.

“Well. I don’t think I should tell you who told me.”

Strangely Sungyeon gets more and more frustrated as she sits up in bed, though Yaebin supposes, rather belatedly, that it wasn’t right of her to bring something like that up. But there’s nothing she can do about that now. “Do you really think I would talk to more than one person about something secret and not include you?”

“I don’t even know what this thing is, Sungyeon.” Yaebin rakes her hair back, heart beating fast.

“What did Yewon say to you?”

“I don’t think I should tell you that-”

 _“Say it,_ Kang Yaebin.”

“She said you were thinking about someone. A lot. That’s it. I can’t remember if she said anything else. I was just worried for you, you were spacing out during lunch, hid in your room a lot, around then,” Yaebin says, searching for words, stringing her sentences together.

“When?”

“When you were thinking about them? Or...”

“When did she tell you.”

“Sometime last week.”

Sungyeon finally breathes a long sigh. “Fine. Fine.”

“Does it matter?” she asks, subconsciously.

Sungyeon opens her mouth to say something, loses her will, and swallows what she wanted to say.

“I want to think that it does.”

Yaebin doesn’t know where to go from here. “I’m sorry that I asked Yewon instead of you.”

Sungyeon exhales unevenly, brushing the hair out of her face. “It’s okay. I don’t think I would have wanted to explain to someone else. Maybe I won’t kill her for telling you like I planned to,” she says, and the tinge of insincerity makes Yaebin feel like everything is okay after all.

“What are you thinking about right now?” she asks carefully.

“I wonder if Yewon is going to check on me,” Sungyeon says, looking at the blanket she tossed on the floor. “I wonder if she noticed that you came in here.”

“Bet she went to watch with Nunu on the couch.” Yaebin sits back down on the bed, and Sungyeon moves her legs further away. “Do you feel better?”

Sungyeon scrunches up her face. “How can you make me feel better when you don’t even know what I was feeling?”

“Does that mean I did, or are you being sarcastic?”

“Don’t get full of yourself, unnie.”

The motion sensor in her room stops detecting movement, and the light switches off. Sungyeon lies flat on the bed, and Yaebin leans against the wall upright, unmoving. “Should I wave my hands?” Yaebin asks.

“No,” Sungyeon answers. “I wish I had a remote for my fairy lights.”

It’s pitch black in Sungyeon’s undecorated room, aside from the hallway light streaming through the cracks. Eunwoo and Yewon are commenting on the film in their background, her door is too thin.

“Are we just talking now?”

“Do you want to know what I was thinking about before?” Sungyeon asks instead of answering.

Yaebin lets herself fall onto the bed, half of her body supported by the wall. The lights switch back on, and the heating system starts up again after its break before, broken equilibrium. Hot air rushes past her limbs. Sungyeon still takes up most of the area on the bed, and for once Yaebin feels reluctant to infringe on her space.

“Can I guess? Then you’ll tell me when I’m wrong. But it’s fun to have a chance of being right.”

Sungyeon waits, silence indicating agreement.

“You’re afraid of bothering this person.”

“Not true.”

Yaebin raises her eyebrows. “That was quick.” Sungyeon shrugs and rolls her eyes.

“I told you that you were wrong, that’s all!”

Yaebin doesn’t ask for a second chance but takes it anyway. “This person makes you worried.”

“Sometimes.”

“I guess we’re playing this game now. Something bad happened to them.”

“Not really.”

“Fine, I give up. Wait, last one. You like them.”

Sungyeon sighs, again, and suddenly looks dismal. “I can’t believe that wasn’t your first guess.”

“Are you trying to confess?”

“No.”

“Why are you so sad?”

“Let’s stop talking about this,” Sungyeon decides. She stares at the ceiling, hugging her pillow, but makes no effort to conceal herself with sheets again.

“Should I leave now?”

“If you want to,” Sungyeon says. Yaebin doesn’t move. But then she reaches for Sungyeon’s hand, and it’s clammy, but so are Yaebin’s so it’s equitable.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. Sungyeon pulls her hand away.

“It’s okay.”

The room is warm now. Sungyeon’s room is not even large, and she has a space heater going in the spot next to her desk, Yaebin notices.

“I’m sleepy. Can I fall asleep here?”

“Stop joking around,” Sungyeon says, and starts to push her off the bed with her bare feet. Yaebin scrambles to grip the sheets and falls to the floor laughing. Sungyeon wipes a tear from her eye.

In the living room the climax of the movie is playing because Eunwoo is shrieking and the music overlayed is the most dramatic, love tension filled song Yaebin knows. Sungyeon falls silent.

“It’s about this?”

“Maybe,” Sungyeon says quietly, a voice full of air.

“Are you jealous?” Yewon is distinctly crying.

“I don't even know if I could hear those words said to me by the one I want to hear them from.”

“You don’t know if you will, but you can,” Yaebin says. “You just need to have hope. And try, I guess. We all know you’re too shy to make a move.”

“I hate you,” Sungyeon says.

Yaebin smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yaebin -> sungyeon [when you love someone](https://popgasa.com/2017/09/29/day6-when-you-love-someone-%EA%B7%B8%EB%A0%87%EB%8D%94%EB%9D%BC%EA%B3%A0%EC%9A%94/) \- accidentally inspired by rea


End file.
